Daisy was submerged in boiling water. She didn't know how she knew this and was so calm about it, considering she was submerged in boiling water, but she felt a strange sense of detachment about everything.
She could feel her lungs filling and bubbling and tearing as she spluttered and breathed in liquid against her will, and she could feel her eyes melting shut.
There was a word for it.
Scalding. She was scalding.
When she was pulled out into the cold air, it felt like ice on her steaming skin. Still, the pain seemed somehow distant, though thatough didn't stop her utter terror.
She tried to scream but her lungs were so damaged the most she could manage was a wheezing squeal.
"Shhh," said a voice, and it was one she knew.
Daisy woke up soaked in sweat.
Daisy didn't have the night shift. Daisy didn't actually have many shifts at all, considering her superiors mostly let her handle things and didn't bother supervising her all that much.
Daisy didn't have the night shift but here she was, in the middle of the night, skidding through the alleys in pursuit of a "woman".
Daisy had seen it, shuffling on the side of the road, staring at passersby with a hungry look. It covered every inch of skin it could with scarves and a thick jacket, but Daisy could smell something earthy, wet, and strange emanating from it. It's rotten-wood stink was like a beacon, a screaming siren begging Daisy to take chase. She followed her nose like Theseus followed Ariadne's red thread and let it carry her away on it's copper and claret-coloured winds.
Daisy had begun tailing the "woman" when the sun went low in the sky. The creature might have been headed to it's home, if it had one, but at some point it cottoned on to Daisy's lurking, and was now running through abandoned streets and narrow in-betweens, only occasionally bursting through a person.
When it bumped into a man taking a smoke break it stumbled and gasped out something unintelligible that might have been an apology, then whirled around to dash around the corner. Daisy shoved the complaining man to the side with little care, brandishing her police badge like a weapon.
Daisy hadn't been sleeping well recently.
The creature had had an advantage in the chase for a while, but it seemed sort of sickly and Daisy could tell it wouldn't be able to keep up it's pace for much longer.
When it finally tripped over a curb and was sent sprawling on the ground, Daisy did not hesitate to pounce, the fluttering and pounding heartbeats of prey and predator alike filling her vision with their red and noble blood.
She tackled it to the ground in a burst of motion, then grabbed it's arm and wrenched it over it's back, clicking a handcuff shut over it's wrist. She breathed out, almost able to actually see the smoke puffing in front of her, as she released the last vestiges of her adrenaline.
It was then that Daisy saw what was under the jacket sleeve she'd hiked up to get the handcuff on.
Small black bubbles dotted it's wrist, bursting through the membrane and causing a straining and stretching of the papery skin around the places where the bubbles festered. A white crust surrounded each bubble like sea foam.
Some of it's skin just had the raised white circles, which lacked the bubble in the center. Daisy might have mistaken it for a simple ringworm infection if she didn't already know better.
It's nails were starting to be eaten away by white crust and the start of the bubbles, but it was clear the worst of the infection hadn't extended that far yet.
Daisy made a face, "Gross."
The creature turned it's face around to look at her, pleading in it's eyes. It's scarves had fallen down it's face and Daisy noted with some fascinated revulsion that the cornea of it's eye was starting to become overgrown with a bulbous black pustule, and that a clump of grown-together bubbles covered the side of it's neck and seemed to make it difficult to move, if the way the area around the clump had started to sluggishly ooze a pinkish liquid was any indication.
"P-please, Officer," it choked out, "I need help. I can't go to a doctor. I can't get any medicine. It- it won't go away ."
Daisy largely tuned it out, instead fastening the second cuff around the "woman"'s other wrist, gingerly avoiding the spots where the infection covered. She wrinkled her nose in disgust when it started sobbing and begging, alternating between pleading to Daisy and to God. It made her so angry this thing could just play at being human, could try to manipulate her.
Daisy would never let anyone control her. Never. She was smarter than that.
Even if the "woman" had once been human, it certainly wasn't anymore, and no matter how it had whined that it didn't want this and needed help, she knew it was a lie. Daisy had shown mercy once before, and that had been a mistake. If she didn't stop the monster while she could, it would only fall deeper into corruption. There was no redemption from this sort of infection. The only solution was to root it out.
The monster went sort of limp after a while of Daisy holding it at gunpoint and walking it towards her patrol car. It wouldn't move even after Daisy kicked it and yelled at it, and it refused to get into the car. She eventually contained the creature in a tarp to keep it from getting it's spores all over the upholstery, tied it with hooked bungee cords she used to hold sleeping bags and luggage, and put it in the trunk. The thing was much heavier than it should have been, considering it's emaciated frame, and Daisy grunted when she lifted the body. It still wasn't dead, not yet, as was evidenced by the shifting of the tarp and the soft cries that came from the back every so often, especially when Daisy drove over a bump.
Eventually, she came to that clearing where she'd always known this would end, where hundreds of other creeping crawling things now sat still and silent beneath her feet. She took the tarp-covered monster out of the car and put it down, then found a place where no others were, where she could lay to rest this thing.
It was going to be morning soon, and the cloak of night was already lifting, which meant Daisy had to make this quick. On the bonus side, at least the better light made it easier to see what she was doing.
And so Daisy dug through the night to the sun's rising. Every clink of the shovel and every scrape it made against the dirt sounded deafeningly loud, even wreathed in the birdsong of morning.
When she decided the hole was deep enough, Daisy turned to the tarp and unhooked the bungee cords. The creature pretending to be a woman blinked it's fungus-coated eyelids in the pale yellow light. It looked at her, wriggling as it awkwardly attempted to manoeuver itself upright with it's arms handcuffed behind it's back.
She clicked off the safety on the gun, vaguely noting the stretch of it's mouth open in horror as the start of a scream escaped like a bird through the treeline, and aimed it at it's head.
Daisy dug deeper and deeper, lulled by the rhythmic sounds of shovel hitting dirt, and loose dirt hitting the ground where she tossed it in a pile next to the hole. The sound might have made her nervous once, but right now it soothed her.
She dug and dug, not to find something, but to make room for something. But when her shovel hit an object thicker and harder than dirt, she still felt a rush of excitement and nerves at the prospect of uncovering something hiding.
The thrill of chasing down and catching wasn't really so different from the thrill of digging deep and finding.
She tossed the shovel up to the side, over the top of the hole that was so deep now the walls of earth towered above her head impossibly, leaving her with not a clue how she even managed to make it so deep, and so neatly square.
She used her hands to uncover the last bits of dirt and was shocked to find the treasure underneath matching in colour to her own hands.
It was the feeling of discovering, in a strange place, something not strange, but jarringly familiar.
It took her a moment to reach the conclusion she did, but eventually she conceded there was no way to deny what she already knew.
What she'd uncovered was the tips of fingers, poking out of the earth, slightly bent by her hitting them with a shovel.
When she looked closer, she found a tiny round mark on one of the knuckles, sluggishly oozing a pink liquid.
Later, the morning after she chased down the infected creature, while scrubbing dirt from her hands, the shovel already put away in the closet, Daisy would think about the burst of pink squishy things that she'd never given a second thought to before now, and feel faintly queasy.